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Don't be a jerk
111–120 of 135 posts
Re: Don't be a jerk
#112FWIW, I've noticed that most of the Ask HN threads don't seem to get much participation from the person doing the asking -- so I've answering any of them, even on the really rare occasions when I might be qualified to answer or have an opinion on the question.
It's sort of unfortunate to see the usual suspects, like patio11, putting effort into a comment on an Ask HN thread only to see no response from the submitter.
Re: Don't be a jerk
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
On certain topics, HN always had a downvote problem for certain contrarian opinions. For example, heaven forbid you didn't think everything Apple produced when Steve Jobs was alive was a gift from heaven. Anything questioning that was always downvoted, even if presented in a non-snarky way. It was so bad that pg even introduced a downvote floor (-5) to keep people from shedding hundreds of points of karma when the do…
> On certain topics, HN always had a downvote problem for certain contrarian opinions. For example, heaven forbid you didn't think everything Apple produced when Steve Jobs was alive was a gift from heaven Also see: Snowden is not a hero, Piracy is not ok & The NSA snooping is not so bad.
The sad thing is all of those things are opinon-based and if we all started downvoting every opinion we disagree with then the comments here would surely be doomed.
Would be nice if heavily downvoted comments (even if they were countered with even heavier upvotes) were reviewed once in a while and if they contained no 'bad' material the downvoters downvoting privileges would be rescinded.
Re: Don't be a jerk
#114wat
Re: Don't be a jerk
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad you decided to pick out and focus on the first line from my comment.
Why do people say things like this? That first line is what's attracting downvotes. It's what people are going to respond to. Someone is gently, politely, pointing out that the line "welcome to the Internet" is going to cause you problems and your response is to bicker?
When I wrote that first line, I knew that somebody will completely ignore the rest of the comment and make a post about it. Adding nothing to the actual discussion.
There is absolutely nothing serious about the first line. The rest of the post clearly indicates it.
Reminds me of people who will show up to threads featuring proof of concept implementations and comment on how the code lacks unit testing.
Re: Don't be a jerk
#116I don't think there should be a downvote option. There should be an option for upvoting, and an option for flagging offensive content/content that is against the HN community guidelines. As it stands, there is no visual emphasis on high quality comments. There is a visual emphasis on low quality comments. Why is that? Apologies in advance if I am making an ignorant statement.
J, I cannot express how much I agree with you. The base logic in downvoting is so flawed it baffles me. How can you take away something from someone if you did not give it to them in the first place. Downvoting, especially without commenting, is exactly what the First Amendment was established for.
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Re: Don't be a jerk
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't fall back on things like "welcome to the internet." One, it's needlessly snarky. Two, we would like this place to be better .
We'd like that, but... after a long time of people trying to build internet communities, from newsgroups to Slashdot to Reddit to HN, it seems like this may be what the internet is. Or, perhaps, this is what you get when you allow open membership.
And the parent got downvoted. That's just too beautifully ironic not to point out.
Re: Don't be a jerk
#118It seems like this is an instance of a more general trend: The commenting ecosystem is in decline. It's better than Reddit, but it's a shadow of what it once was. I've noticed downvotes are trending now. The downvotes do correct themselves... most of the time. But there's a lot more frivolous downvoting due to the influx of people that have attained downvote privileges but haven't really shunned the mindset of other…
Hacker news mods have repeatedly said that they only respect professionalism, and they intentionally ban people they feel are controversial to a strong degree. So long as this is true, you are going to lose the passionate 1% of the community. The passionate 1% are those who keep the rest of the riff raff in check ultimately. As far as I am concerned, "Do you want X? This is how you get X." If Hacker News wants to hav…
Banning people that are obnoxious is a different thing than banning people that are controversial.
It also seems to be the case that there are a lot less bans since dang became a public moderator, I only see them hitting new accounts that get mistaken for spam.
Re: Don't be a jerk
#119There always seems to be a touch of nostalgia for the good old days when situations like this come up. People undoubtedly yearn for the time when Hacker News was smaller and more close knit community. Ive been a member here for about 3 and a half years. I suppose that in that time, some of the quality has declined, but I really cant even say for sure that is the case. I think I have learned a lot here, and because of…
Small communities become insular festivals of group-think. Large communities become whitewashed noise full of trolls. There doesn't seem to be a way to "win".
There's always a healthy middle ground: form a community with healthy cultural norms in matters of politeness, courtesy, intellectual rigor - all elements of form - while encouraging the greatest possible diversity of substance. Make it clear to people that be adhering to the norms of form, they'll be a welcomed member of the community, without being censured for the actual substance of their arguments, but merely argued against politely by those who disagree. (Sure, there are people who take any counter-argument as a personal insult, but that's just one of the things we need strong cultural norms against.)
I suppose it's a challenge to maintain this sort of pattern as a community scales, which is why sites like HN, Reddit, StackExchange, etc. all try to incorporate incentives and constraints into the mechanics of discussion to attempt to reinforce certain styles of participation, with varying success. In this situation, a simple mechanic to prevent people from doing what OP is complaining about would be to prevent comments from being deleted once they've been replied to.
It bugs me when I see long streams of deleted comments on Reddit, too - it'd be an interesting experiment to treat posts and comments in a discussion forum like wiki pages - freely editable at any time by the poster, but with the full edit history always available to see.
Re: Don't be a jerk
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people say things like this? That first line is what's attracting downvotes. It's what people are going to respond to. Someone is gently, politely, pointing out that the line "welcome to the Internet" is going to cause you problems and your response is to bicker?
When I wrote that first line, I knew that somebody will completely ignore the rest of the comment and make a post about it. Adding nothing to the actual discussion. There is absolutely nothing serious about the first line. The rest of the post clearly indicates it. Reminds me of people who will show up to threads featuring proof of concept implementations and comment on how the code lacks unit testing.
I'm trying to gently inform you what kind of content HN aims for. Snark which does not add to the discussion is among that; it gets in the way of discussion. I'm surprised you went ahead with saying it, knowing that.